[Please excuse the cross postings.] At the end of this month I will have the privilege of a presenting a day-long, hands-on workshop on open source software and XML at the Ticer "digital library" school, and I have made much of my presentation available online in the hopes of getting some feedback from you, sets of my peers. Please see: About Ticer - http://tinyurl.com/yso2ey OSS and XML - http://boole.uvt.nl/ The OSS and XML workshop covers things such as: * reading and writing MARC records * indexing and searching MARC records * harvesting and serving metadata via OAI-PMH * moving from MARC to XML * designing and implementing XML vocabularies * transforming XML into other document types * indexing and searching XML * "mashing" content together From the workshop's summary: The combined use of open source software and XML are the current means for getting the most out of your computing infrastructure. Their underlying philosophies are akin to the principles of librarianship. They enable. They empower. They are flexible. They are "free". The way to get from here to there is through a bit of re-training and re-engineering of the way libraries do their work, not what they do but how they do it. Let's not confuse the tools of our profession with the purpose of the profession. If you think libraries and librarianship are about books, MARC, and specific controlled vocabularies, then your future is limited. On the other hand, if you think libraries are about the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of data, information, and knowledge, then the future is quite bright. Finally, be forewarned, the link to the workshop is temporary since the hosting machine will be wiped clean as soon as a the day after the workshop. -- Eric Lease Morgan Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department University Libraries of Notre Dame (574) 631-8604